What can't be published

This summer I took a break from my day job in Toronto to spend July at the Banff Centre working on a story for their Literary Journalism program. I had pitched a memoir about growing up in Guildwood during the late ’80s and early ’90s, about coming of age in serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo’s hometown during his crimes as the Scarborough Rapist. They kindly accepted me into the program, and provided me with the much-needed space and seclusion to work long hours in my own cabin on their mountain-view campus.

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My proposal stated I would embark on an exploration of what it was like to be a girl growing up down the street from Bernardo’s childhood home, attending his high school, “living under a pervasive and hysterical fear of violation.”

Four weeks in the woods passed. After reading hundreds of newspaper reports and op-eds from the era, I wrote 10,000 difficult words, forensically edited by some of the greatest, toughest editors in the country. And now, from where I sit, it feels unlikely I will ever publish them. It is hard for me to even read them.

This isn’t because I don’t feel, as they say, “confident” about the piece. In many ways it is the best I have ever written. Yet proposals, like all intentions, are tricky things. What happened over the course of that month, while cut off from the normal structure of day-to-day life — my job, my husband, my friends — was that I faced an experience that I had long neglected over decades. The all-encompassing process pushed at me to expose more and more, until I was a walking open wound, telling stories I never intended to tell, revealing facts I never intended to disclose.

What was supposed to be a coldly reported, near-anthropological study of a specific community during a specific time, instead became a forced visceral purging of my own violation. My own sexual assault.

A skilled and intensive editing process, like the one I was privileged enough to receive at the Banff Centre, drives you to ask questions of yourself, to mine the details that are specific, engaging and immersive. That will put the reader directly in the scene as if they were experiencing it themselves.

How old were you? How did you end up in that situation? What were you wearing? What was the weather like? What did you say? What did he do? What did it feel like, smell like, taste like in your mouth? Why didn’t you report it?

“I know you say you can’t remember it,” one inky scrawled note read in the margins of my sixth draft. “But we need more detail here.” And alone in that room, for hours at a time, I pulled up every ugly detail until I became sick from it.

“When you are a young woman and your body becomes a reminder of tragedy, how can you ever come to love it?” I wrote in that secluded cabin in Banff. “You yourself become a crime scene — a place of mourning you carry with you every day. Something tolerated, hated or, most commonly, ignored. I am happy for those people who see the body as a tool of empowerment, a vessel for pleasure and strength, but I’ve had to unlearn mine as a site of violence out of necessity.”

My father often says to me that I leave too much of myself on the page. He worries that the disclosure inherent to the personal essay will leave me vulnerable, will allow people access to me in a way I don’t intend. He is right, of course — writing honestly, authentically and well is a courageous act that involves the most invasive kind of exposure. If executed properly, not only are you forced to face the reality of your own horrific experience, you also present it, raw and unfettered, to strangers who can do with it, and say about it, what they please.

How did you end up in that situation? What were you wearing? Why didn’t you report it?

Writing is risk, yet for me, personal protection is always superseded by the purpose of the craft; it is an act of figuring out a feeling, a way of lending structure to an experience that feels impossibly fraught, a process of giving value to suffering. It is a lone strategy for untangling the webs of chaos, of making pain purposeful, of moving people to comfort and driving them to change.

Currently, Toronto women are living in fear. There are perpetrators of sexual assaults prowling multiple neighbourhoods. As the number of victims increase, I feel the familiar pulse of fear growing in the people around me, a frenzied hysteria disturbingly similar to that of that era I deeply researched while secluded in my cabin in the woods. And just like the newspaper reports of the ’80s and ’90s that surrounded the Scarborough Rapist, there is a slew of misguided commentary on how women can prevent themselves from being “easy targets.” Women are consistently asked to be “aware,” as if they aren’t already aware every hour of every day.

Words are being used to dictate what women wear, how much they drink, what hours of the night they are allowed to travel in. It is more than 20 years since Paul Bernardo’s gruesome Scarborough attacks, and the conversation still hinges on what women should do to protect themselves. It has become tedium, this multiple-decade standard hum of complete disregard for a woman’s reality. When police “encourage women to be vigilant,” they fail to recognize that women are already living in a constant state of vigilance that is no way to live, under the ceaseless threat of violation, by a stranger or by someone they know. All these years and words and we have failed to learn that no amount of prescribed costume changing or behavioural policing will ever change that.

“I felt like I’d made myself vulnerable, despite everything I had been taught about keeping myself safe,” I wrote of my assault in that secluded cabin in Banff. “By the police, the media, parents and teachers.”

As writers, we like to think what we do is empowering, that it transforms people in some way, effects change and brings solace. That it is a way of moving through and letting go. But writing about rape always rouses in me this particular brand of overwhelming hopelessness. Fatigue sets in — as if no line ever written can possibly influence the staggering statistics of women’s violent and violating lived experience. As if no artful sentence can possibly assuage the seemingly unending grief and despair for survivors of assault. For myself.

The week the Bloor and Christie suspect was revealed by the police, a male friend walked me home through the neighbourhood where the attacks took place. It was late on a Friday night, and he insisted on accompanying me after sharing dinner and ice cream, noting the sheer lunacy of me doing it myself after the constant reports, tweets, blog posts, Take Back The Night and self-defence course invitations.

While we were walking past Bloor and Grace, where one of the assaults reportedly occurred, two extremely drunk boys, estimated to be in their teens, staggered towards us and slurred their directions. We obliged them, and watched as they stumbled on their way, towards the subway.

In that moment, I realized they were enjoying a freedom I had never had and could never have. Blind drunk and exposed in the middle of the night, they wandered gleefully, happily and safely, conversing with strangers and inviting attention. The very things the written words that week had told me I wasn’t allowed to do.

The idea of it — their liberty vs. my need to be gratefully, soberly escorted by virtue of my sex — enraged me. In fact, we should all be enraged, every moment of every day, in a way that words can never express.

Until the reality of that summer night and so many women’s daily experiences shifts, I will always feel the helplessness and hopelessness of writing about rape. No retreat in the mountains, no perfect conditions, will ever assuage that nagging feeling that writing can never properly serve the pain of the experience. How futile the spilling of column inches feels, the dissection of my own assault feels, in the face of that particular monolith of injustice — represented as simply as a man walking down the street unaccompanied when I cannot. Until there is a change, if it ever comes, I will always have the impulse to leave a carefully edited piece that dissects my own violation languishing in a desk drawer.

“No matter how much I unpack and process the details,” I wrote in that secluded cabin in Banff. “They will never leave me.”

The Toronto Rape Crisis Centre is holding its 2012 Take Back The Night rally and march on Saturday Sept. 15, starting at Masaryk Cowan Community Recreation Centre, 220 Cowan Ave, at 6 p.m.